Celebrating unemployment in SA is disingenuous

CELEBRATING May 1 (Workers Day) in South Africa is a farce.

All it means here is that 35% of the registered workforce is sitting at home, which they do anyway. There is nothing to celebrate. A realistic unemployment rate with casual labour and piecemeal work included is more likely closer to 50%. Effectively this means that half our workforce is unemployed. Perhaps I’ve missed something but celebrating a 50% unemployment rate is disingenuous, farcical and an insult to our workforce.

Another fiasco was in celebrating Freedom day (April 27). Freedom from what, exactly? Freedom from poverty? Freedom from corruption? Freedom from crime? Freedom from gender violence? Freedom from homelessness? Freedom from hunger and despair? Following independence in 1994 and the end of apartheid, the freedoms that should have followed simply never materialised. Instead, we had the Gupta years of State capture.

During the vast majority of the past 28 years, government coffers were stripped to the tune of over 2 trillion rand, going into the pockets of thieves and scoundrels, many of who still walk the corridors of Parliament today having amassed fortunes enabling them to make a monkey out of the law, as Jacob Zuma is doing.

The only light in this dark tunnel is Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, who has outed the hyenas that fed off the carcass of a destroyed country. History will judge him kindly and schoolchildren will read about him for the next 50 years. When his time comes, South Africa will have lost a brave soldier who stood tall and did his job. The most significant sentence that this giant of a man uttered was, I quote: “Where was the ANC while all this was going on?” This is a question that will never be answered.

COLIN BOSMAN | Newlands